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How to Make Money with Mobile Media

If you’re like many people, you’re finally wrapping your mind around social media. You may be thinking, “At last, I finally get Twitter and understand Facebook and see how LinkedIn can be used for business.”

Given everything you’ve learned about social media over the past 12 to 18 months, you might be ready to take a little breather. And that’s understandable. After all, in addition to learning social media, you were also trying to do your day job.

It’s a lot to ask.

Well … brace yourself. Because no sooner have we all wrapped our minds around social media than mobile media hits the big time.

Mobile Media Comes of Age. It’s safe to say that almost everyone reading this blog post has downloaded an iPhone, Android or Windows app. And the chances are that you may have used Foursquare, Yelp or Gowalla on your Smart Phone. And if you’re an advanced user, you’ve probably even snapped a QR code and experienced that whole shebang.

Despite that, you may still not completely understand how to use mobile media to grow your business. After all, it’s one thing to use Foursquare, Yelp or Gowalla, but it’s an entirely different thing to understand how to think strategically about using mobile media to connect with prospects and customers.

I have some good news. I’ve written a short, 25-page introduction to mobile media for the Financial Times Press called How to Make Money with Mobile Media. It’s a quick, but content-packed introduction to mobile media that’s perfect for marketing directors, entrepreneurs, sole proprietors, CEOs or just about anybody who is interested in using mobile media to grow their sales and revenue.

Before we dive further into how you’re going to use mobile media to connect with your consumers, it’s important to understand how consumers are using mobile media to connect with businesses. For example, Yelp allows customers to get restaurant reviews from their mobile devices. This is perfect for the consumer who is visiting an unfamiliar city and wants to check out the reviews of a restaurant prior to walking through the door. As if that weren’t engaging enough, Yelp also has an augmented reality application that allows users to point their smartphone viewer down a street and have tags pop up over the restaurants on that street. That gives potential diners the ability to look through the viewfinder of their smartphones at a live image of the street and to see ratings and reviews of the restaurants on that street.

Consumers are also getting more comfortable with QR codes. The Smithsonian Institution used QR codes to enhance the experience smartphone users were having in their Natural History Museum. In the museum’s exhibit on early human Neanderthals, they encouraged visitors to snap a QR code that would link their smartphone to an application called MEanderthal. The MEanderthal application superimposes an image over a photograph of the users to make them look like cavemen from 30,000 years ago. In other words, people visiting the exhibit could snap the QR code, superimpose a Neanderthal’s facial features over their own, and then share it with friends at the museum or even email it to others.

Chili’s found an interesting way to use mobile media to attract customers. The popular location-based smartphone application called Foursquare was used to provide coupons for free cheese dip for people who checked in at a Chili’s location. That’s pretty cool, but what made this even cooler was that Chili’s sent the same coupon to people who checked into other Foursquare locations nearby. In other words, they sent coupons for free cheese dip when people checked in to any store within 200 yards of their Chili’s locations.

As mentioned previously, LinkedIn allows people to exchange contact information by simply “bumping” their phones together. By using Near Field Communication technology, LinkedIn enables smartphones to exchange data between devices over a 10-centimeter (around 4 inch) distance. Bump accomplishes the same thing, only it allows consumers to exchange contact information, photos, social networks, and calendar events, too. So, as you can see, there are a lot of terrific ways consumers are using mobile media to connect with the brands they love. This leads us to our next question: How are you going to use mobile media to connect with your consumers?

If you’re in business, then you should be in mobile media. After all, a recent research study found that consumers who leave their homes without their wallets usually won’t turn around, but if they leave their home without their mobile phones, they’ll almost always turn around.

If that’s not enough to tell you that mobile media is the future, then I don’t know what is.

P.S. I don’t make any additional money from the sale of these guides. Why? Because I haven’t gotten my act together enough to set up the affiliate links. But in the future when I have anything tied to an affiliate link, I’ll always let you know.

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